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Now that the meat market auction is over, it seems inevitable that everyone is looking to see who won.

While a lot of players and draft choices have changed teams, the situation in the Western Conference remains the same as it did prior to Friday.

There is no clear favourite.

It will be a crazy, unpredictable ride to the playoffs and an eventual spot in the Memorial Cup tournament.

The trade deadline winner may well be the London Knights, a team that is already guaranteed a spot in the tournament. It had nothing to do with what other teams did around them nor really did it have to do with what the Knight did on their own.

It was all about a player that didn’t move.

The Knights dodged a bullet when the Saginaw Spirit decided to hang onto goaltender Jake Paterson. While the Knights will attempt a Memorial Cup run with Anthony Stolarz as the No. 1 guy and their own Jake Patterson backing him up, they were sweating bullets that Paterson would wind up with a team like the Guelph Storm.

The Storm already helped themselves by getting Kerby Rychel and Nick Ebert from the Windsor Spitfires in December. They are deep up front and deep on defence. If they have an Achilles’ heel, most people believe it’s their goaltending.

Paterson would have been the cherry on top of a pretty nice looking sundae.

A number of teams, including the Storm, were sniffing around Mississauga Steelheads netminder Spencer Martin. He too remained in place, again to the Knights advantage.

The Knights were unusually quiet at the trade deadline. Much of the action for them occurred before Christmas when players they thought would help them became available.

That made their goal during the frenetic maneuverings during the trade deadline to simply get a little better.

They got a lot better.

The Knights could have used another solid defensive defenceman but the price was too high. The Knights hope that having Nikita Zadorov back on a fulltime basis now is enough to make that blue-line unit good enough.

Since goaltenders were also an expensive commodity, they focused on getting someone who could score and skate. They landed a good one in Gemel Smith from Owen Sound. He’s going to give them depth up front and on the power play.

If you can’t get help on the blue-line, you might as well get a scorer so you can throw a bunch of offence at the Storm, who have iffy goaltending, and at Erie Otters, who have Oscar Dansk, statistically the best goaltender in the league. Either way he’s going to help an offence that is already among the top in the league,

Inevitably the Knights will hear about how they didn’t get another blue-liner and didn’t get goaltending help should Stolarz have another bad run as he did in the Memorial Cup and late in the playoffs last year.

That’s somewhat myopic. The Knights did what they could and are a better team today.

The Knights aren’t the only team that didn’t get everything they wanted. The Storm wanted goaltending help more than the Knights did.

The Otters were looking for a defenceman that could move the puck.

Neither team was able to come up with what they needed.

No team is perfect. That’s why the Knights would have been pleased goaltenders like Paterson and Martin and puck moving defenceman Slater Koekkoek of the Windsor Spitfires remained with their teams.

Complaining the Knights didn’t do enough is nothing new. There were complaints last year when they didn’t do much at the trade deadline.

They went on to win OHL championship.

This won’t be easy. There are four or five teams that have the capability of winning a championship. But if the Knights lose, it won’t have anything to do with what they did or didn’t do at the trade deadline.